Meet ‘Flippy’

“Flippy” is what happens when the minimum wage climbs to a level that forces businesses to reduce the size of their labor force to make ends meet.

California’s CaliBurger’s Pasadena restaurant is employing Flippy, a $60,000 burger-flipping robot capable of turning out 150 burgers an hour, as the state edges toward a $15 minimum wage. Plans call for the machines across the franchise, the Washington Free Beacon reports. How many jobs that will cost is unclear.

The minimum wage in California is slated to reach $15 an hour by 2022.

It is unsurprising that CaliBurger, and others working with slim profit margins, are turning to automation as labor costs increase, and when they do, the first jobs affected are entry-level positions, many of them held by women and minorities.

University of Washington researchers looked at Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage and concluded:

“Our preferred estimates suggest that the Seattle Minimum Wage Ordinance caused hours worked by low-skilled workers (i.e., those earning under $19 per hour) to fall by 9.4 percent during the three quarters when the minimum wage was $13 per hour, resulting in a loss of 3.5 million hours worked per calendar quarter. Alternative estimates show the number of low-wage jobs declined by 6.8 percent, which represents a loss of more than 5,000 jobs.”

While a $15 minimum wage seems an obsession with the political left, it perversely and predictably tends to hurt the very people the left pretends to help – and the economics of it all are pretty easy to understand.

When activists tell you businesses such as restaurants can thrive by raising their labor costs, they know better. It is just another fairy tale.